


Mandated Reporter

by horchata



Category: Travelers (TV)
Genre: F/M, Protocol Five, Protocol Four, Version Two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:01:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28147260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horchata/pseuds/horchata
Summary: Everything’s a procedure.
Relationships: David Mailer/Marcy Warton | Traveler 3569
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Mandated Reporter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Joylee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joylee/gifts).



> > _Look, you’re new, I get it, I really do. And you’ve got a bitch of a first assignment. But I’ve been here a year, and shit happens, okay? It’s a tough call. Get it right, please._  
>  \--Officer Boyd  
> 

“Marcy!”

“Marcy, what--”

Take stock of the situation. She’s clutching her left hemisphere with one hand and the brownie in the other, but she’s not on the ground like they said to expect. It’s the husband, holding her up against himself, looking her over. There’s music still in the background, but the party’s attention is all on her now. Now that her host has fallen to her knees screaming.

“Are you okay?”

“What happened?”

She runs her tongue along her new teeth, the roof of her mouth. Not even a bite. Just in time. ”Migraine,” she answers, grateful. The Director’s gotten better at being precise.

“Oh, Marce, God, is that from my plate?” a woman asks, crowding around the bulk of the husband to lift it from her hand. “These are straight up almond flour, you could’ve died! Shit.”

“Shit,” the husband echoes, hands moving up and down her arms. He briefly rubs the backs of his fingers over her stomach. “ _Marcy_.That bad?”

What, the migraine she invented? The party? The transfer? She shrugs, letting the wild swing of pain-adrenaline take over her face. Her knees ache and she runs with it. She feels bad for Marcy Mailer. To die like that, careless and swollen, covered in hives in front of all these people? This body doesn’t feel inebriated. What could possibly have been distracting her so much she’d forget a food allergy? 

She tries to stand, and the husband helps.

“We’re up!” he announces, and is met with friendly cheers; several people rub her shoulders, her back. She’s wrapped in a hug. 

She’s shorter now. Her voice is different. This is more people than have touched her affectionately in months. They said the transfer would be instantaneous and painless, but damn this body’s tired. She’s tired. She sinks into his embrace.

Then the woman is back, bright blue earrings, sparkly shirt. “I was going to offer you a drink before but, hon, Marce -- do you need to go?”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “I’m fine.” 

The husband pulls back, looks down at her, lingering.

“We don't need to panic as long as my pupils are the same size,” she deflects, trying to play it off as a joke. 

He grimaces. “We need to go, the nurse just jumped out.”

Bright Blue Earrings shakes her head. The earrings tinkle like laughter. “Work is for work. We clocked out hours ago, Marce. The rest of us are here to party.”

“Really, I’ll just--”

“Babe,” the husband says, stroking her face, “you just fell to the floor and _screamed_ because your head hurt so much. I know for a fact you worked a full shift because you woke me up with your death snore when you got home. You almost ate a gluten-free, taste-free, all-nut, all-death brownie. Marcy” -- and he pauses to kiss her eyebrow, to rest his big forehead on hers in front of all their friends, in front of Bright Blue Earrings -- “Marcy, I’m trying really hard not to cry or be a caveman right now and haul you outta here over my shoulder, but I’m super close, you have to believe me. Let’s go before I snap and somebody calls me a lumberjack.”

She laughs. She can’t help it. He’s funny, so she laughs. He’s _funny_. He was funny on the social media research she did, on all their Facebook posts together, but this is something else. She pulls back and can’t meet his eyes, watches her hand on his chest; feels fingerstuck crumbs from the brownie roll off on his shirt. “Okay,” she says.

He exhales and it sounds cartoonish, a real life _phew_. “Great, because I am not convinced I could carry you given how shaky my knees are right now.”

“David, can I make you a plate?” Bright Blue Earrings asks.

“Jules, I don’t even think I can hold all this adrenaline and my wife’s beautiful hand at the same time.”

“I can put it in a grocery bag.”

“Sold.”

Earrings - Jules - squeezes her shoulder as she passes, presumably to the kitchen. She leans into the husband, mind buzzing. Jules wasn’t on social media, but seems to be another significant relationship, another chess piece to put back on the board of this assignment. She takes and exhales a deep breath.

“Same.”

She laughs again. What relief to know it worked, the brain was good, the body unharmed. To know if nothing else there’d be this useful man to help her stand. 

Everything’s a procedure.

She has to report in, so that comes first. Marcy Mailer used her thumbprint to unlock her phone, and it’s easy enough since Marcy’s fingers are her fingers now to press the little circle and get the right app open and send the email confirming the transfer’s success in the car while the husband drives, but after that the rest of the ride to her new home and the night are a blur in her memory. At some point she strips, at some point she pees; she tries falling right into bed to try to stave off a conversation or concern and remembers the husband hovering, teasing. No shower, no pajamas-- “At least brush your teeth, you monster,” he says. 

She goes quiet and doesn’t know if that’s right, if that’s how Marcy would be, shy or embarrassed. Would she cry? Would she be razor-edged, irritable? Jumpy? She doesn’t have the energy for anything but quiet. She’s so tired.

She’s tired in the morning, too, but it’s the smells that wake her. Something salty, something she can’t name. There’s sunlight coming in the bedroom and it’s beautiful. The bed is soft and comfortable. She stretches and her knuckles hit the bedframe and even that, the dark wood, is beautiful. So often when they picked appropriate potential transfers it was because those people wouldn’t be missed if they went; if things failed, the consequences were slim to none. 

But Marcy Mailer lives in beauty and wakes up to the smell of salt and sun. 

She takes a moment to be grateful, and gets up.

The husband, David Mailer, is in the kitchen. Mailer’s the same as he was in photos, on his passport, on his hospital ID. He scratches his beard and she thinks, I know what your fingertip patterns are. He’s chopping something -- slicing something? The knife is beautiful, and this warm-sharp luscious scent gets stronger as he goes.

“Hey, Marmalade,” and she can’t help taking the big breath that comes with it. The pet name she studied, so she knew who she was now, one of many: Mar-Mar, Marmalade, Seesaw.

You love me, she thinks. You don’t even know me.

“Morning, Mr. Mailer,” she says in a way she hopes is cute.

He winces. “Oof, I’m being ‘mister’d. Still bad?”

Of course she got it wrong. “Not really. I’m just thinking about getting out, doing stuff.” The others on the team would be expecting her at their rendezvous. 

“Big plans,” Mailer intones, half a question.

“You know me,” she hedges. 

She leans on the doorframe and takes in the apartment. It’s all smooth casual hipster, Seattle aesthetics with exposed woodgrain and framed art, just the barest hint of the bicycle wheel she saw in ‘Bike to Work Day’ photos sticking out from the wall mount, the striped blanket on the couch. Everything is brown and cream in ways that feel warm. She wants to run her fingers over the deep tan leather. She wants to trace the coffee table legs and see if she can feel the lines in the grain of the wood.

“Got an appetite at least?”

“Followed my nose,” she says, and taps it. This gets her a smile, and she can feel her feet under herself again, fucking _finally_. 

“Then, please! Sit!” Mailer gestures, arms wide with the knife and an open hand. “Breakfast awaits!”

She walks over to the table and takes a seat, hopes there isn’t a favorite chair she’s missing. Mailer brings over a blue plate with a big yellow folded lump -- eggs? There’s something green in it, too. It thunks dully on the little placemat of the table, clinks the metal fork resting alongside. It smells so rich to her. 

“One pantry omelette, courtesy of our poor bare fridge.” Like it’s nothing, like it’s something that happens every day, he brings his hand up to the back of her head and kisses her, right on the crown of her hair; walks back to the kitchen. “Just lemme finish slicing the orange.”

An _orange_. She remembers seeing them in pictures. She’s been awake ten minutes and hasn’t even gotten outside for orders and the thought of an orange -- grown outside, nourished by clean rain, transported to this table on unbroken highways -- literally gives her vertigo. 

She goes lightheaded -- vasovagal reaction? -- and then flushes hot in her cheeks, in her sinuses. Her eyes flood with tears and she tries to catalogue why -- she expected culture shock, but she doesn't know what the hell is wrong with this body.

Fuck, it’s just food, right? She can eat.

She gets a chunk of it on the fork and steam rises off it, little soft wisps. When she blows they dissipate and rise again. Cheese oozes out from the middle of the eggs and the greens and it smells round and salty. She pops it into her mouth. 

It’s the best thing she’s ever tasted.

She bursts into tears.

“Marcy!”

Hot embarrassment rushes over her, but she can’t help it. The food is so rich -- tangy, smooth and salty, the texture of it fluffy and spongy, so unlike the dense chewy blocks from training. She puts her hand over her mouth and closes her eyes tight to narrow everything down to just taste. Distantly, she feels parts of her screaming to get it together, what the fuck is wrong with you? But this louder part is hungry and tired and has never had a pantry omelette or been kissed on the crown of her head by someone with such big hands.

She blinks tears away to shovel a bigger bite into her mouth and almost sobs. Thank fuck they don’t have the comms in her yet, she won’t tell anyone about this.

“They’re so good,” she manages. 

"Jesus," Mailer laughs, and she looks up to see worry and concern across his features, coming around to her. He pauses, arms ready to wrap her up, but stops short at the fork in her hands. "No, no, eat the eggs, I feel like they're helping?"

She nods, mouth full. Mailer nods with her. “Yeah, get it all out,” he agrees, and hugs her from the side so she can keep eating. She chews until the eggs and salt and whatever else are less than mush on her tongue, and she cries. She cries for the fucked up future she has to fix and for Mailer who doesn’t know his wife is gone, and for Marcy, and her life, and whoever she was. This woman -- Marmalade, Seesaw -- whose husband knew her well enough to not crack a joke about her crying over eggs at their dinner table, who cradles her head to his ribs.

"They weren’t kidding about the mood swings. You think it's the hormones?" he asks.

She swallows, wiping away the tears. "I mean, maybe. I'm not on my period?"

"I should hope not, what with the baby."

All her muscles seize.

Mailer's hands slide to her shoulders as he squats in front of her. "Marcy, was the migraine so bad that -- did you _forget_?"

She can’t speak.

“Were you drugged?”

“No!” she says, shoving him.

“Oh, now I’m just embarrassed for you. After weeks of morning sickness they’d have to wipe your memory or something to get all the vomit off your mind.”

They did. “I hate puking,” she guesses.

“I know, Marcy, I know.” He rubs her knees, where the bruises from falling yesterday are already showing up, rubs his big fingers back and forth over the stubble there. “Pregnancy brain is real. I can’t believe you forgot. I would’ve framed the stick if that wasn’t so gross.”

Her mind is racing. She’s a doctor for fuck’s sake, should this have occurred to her? How much can she get him to tell her without it getting even more suspicious? “This fetus is messing with me. Is it too late to take it back?”

“Oh, babe.” Mailer takes his hands from her knees, sits back on his butt. She feels cold without them. “We are way past Plan B. We are five to eight weeks too late for that Monopoly card.”

He scoots forward and kisses her knees instead, one after the other. "We're in this for the long haul. C'mon, the doctor said the fatigue and barf would lighten by the second trimester. That's right around the corner."

Right around the corner. She tries to recall the current abortion laws, but they were all so piecemeal and completely irrelevant to her mission. But if it wasn’t the second trimester, if it was never on social media for how early things are… 

There’s always an accident, she thinks, oddly sick about it.

"You're the strongest person I know," Mailer tells her with such uncomplicated faith. "You've got this."

She looks at him. You love me, she thinks.

He smiles. “And I’ll make sure we don’t run out of eggs.”

She snorts, snotty, soggy. Her eyes are leaking again, sluggish but uncontrollable. She needs to send a report about potentially reproducing -- but before that, she should get intel on her options -- but before she can even do that, she's pinned under Mailer's hands and there's nothing to do but eat another forkful of breakfast.

The Mailers share a closet, and it’s huge.

Or, at least it feels huge, one long wide room full of things that aren’t scrubs. She can’t find Marcy’s scrubs. In the future, she had her uniform and her civvies, the requisite unmentionables, her stethoscope, her boots. Everything had its little place in her little space and she never lost or couldn’t find anything.

Marcy Mailer has plastic hangers filled with familiar and unfamiliar clothes. There are the ugly Dansko shoes she put on Instagram with little cloud emojis. There’s the shiny camisole coverup from the beach pictures. Almost everything of hers is a dress: short ones, flowy ones, bright colors and patterns, her long, red opera dress. There are jeans slumped in the corner, delicate high heels. She’s never worn heels before. Will she have to practice?

And next to all her things are his.

She runs her fingers over the long-sleeved button downs, the slacks, the lone suit jacket in thin crinkly plastic. Mailer wore that suit when he had taken Marcy to the opera. It didn’t look like it fit right in the pictures, but they had been so happy. 

It’s amazing how -- of all the things she killed and drilled, the years it took to become a field medic, to be mission ready, no one could prepare her for breakfast. For a closet of clothes. For a _shower._

What did she train for? Assassinations, outdated technology, kenophobia -- not attentive loving husbands. Not oranges and eggs and real butter. She learned how to shoot a gun with one hand so she could eliminate terrorists. She learned gin rummy because Marcy Mailer posted “strip gin with gin~” when her last name was still Warton, when they had just begun dating. And here she was, lost in a closet, overwhelmed by a meal and fruit she didn’t even eat. 

And a baby.

“Oh, is it ‘stand around naked’ time? I love ‘stand around naked’ time.”

Mailer comes up behind her and wraps his big clothed arms around her middle. His hands slide up from her belly to her chest and she spins around, suddenly somehow not all ready for that dimension of pretend. 

She holds him back, somewhat, hands on his chest. Her skin is still warm from the shower, and he feels warm, too. Marcy’s animal body responds. This dumb body. “It’s ‘get dressed for work’ time, actually.”

“Those’re your big plans? You’re gonna work like this?”

“No, I’m gonna wear clothes.”

“ _Marcy_.”

“I got a text,” she lies.

“A _text_?” Mailer groans as he walks them backwards, back towards the bed. “Who does this charge nurse think she is?”

“A tyrant,” she guesses, thinking about the doctors who trained her. “But, no, Jules texted. I need to help with charting.”

He whuffs as he sits, bounces a little on the mattress. He tugs her between his legs, runs his hands up and down the backs of her prickly thighs. She hovers above him. “So you’re going to go in after the day we had yesterday?”

“I want to go in,” she says. This fucking body. Tired, sad, horny. She has to leave for the rendezvous, and apparently has to convince both of them. He squeezes the meat of her hips. “I, ah, I need some normalcy. You know?”

“And charts are your normalcy, huh?” His right hand smooths over her ass, down the sides of her legs, slides around warm and steady so the backs of his fingers run up and down her inner thigh, a little higher each time. He licks his lips up at her. “You sure?”

“David,” she breathes. 

“I know we are being cool about it,” he says, “but you fell down in pain yesterday and cried over an omelette today and.” He sighs deeply, leans in and presses a wet kiss low on her belly. “I just want you to feel better.”

He must, because his fingers start moving in their back and forth rock, and for a long moment she’s gone to it, to all this body’s cellular want. Its mind was replaced completely; there’s nothing of Marcy left except for the organ itself, and as far as they knew the brain without a consciousness was a blank slate. But this body was full of progesterone and estrogen and hGC and tenderness and lust, apparently. And it was convincing.

I could just have this, she thinks. Get your shit together, she thinks. 

“I--” and her voice is breathless, so wrecked it makes her laugh and breaks part of the spell of it. “Yeah, hey, I need some help, here.”

“Yeah?”

“We’re gonna assume for, for — fuck, wait, for a second. Hold on.” She takes a steadying breath. “Hold on. So. I need to ask you what regular Marcy would do.”

“What do you mean?” he says in a kiss from her hipbone. He presses his fingers firm and flat, and it feels like a stop. 

“I am not in my right mind today, David. Remind me: Would regular, non-hormonal Marcy choose to be late to work.”

Her entire body responds to his low, frustrated whine. “Okay. Okay.” He sits back up, slides out and away. “Okay.”

It’s a loss, feeling empty, and for whatever reason she — it’s the loud hormones, or whatever, but she catches his wrist and brings it up to her mouth and kisses his wet fingers, takes them into her mouth one by one. 

He makes a guttural sound like she punched him. “I’m going to think of that all day.”

“Good,” she says. She holds his face in her hands. She has taken so much away from this man and he’s blind to it. Lying comes easy, but for Mailer, for—David, a worried husband, she tells the truth. “I’m just going to work. I’m coming back.”

“You better,” he says, playful and not playing.

“I am,” she soothes.

“And if you end up needing something, call me?”

“I’ll call.”

“And if you figure out something that will make you feel better, you’ll tell me so I can do it?” She knows a protocol when she hears one. 

“I’ll tell you,” she says, and is struck by how seriously she means it, how quickly she just. Trusts. “And you’ll do it.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, and they kiss, like this is easy, like this is just Marcy and David and nothing else. 

I could just have this, she thinks. 

Her rendezvous, the team. She has to get dressed and go to work, get comms, get assignments, start. She has to update them on where they are, the details of her transfer, if anything is different than what they could glean from their research.

I could just have this for now, she thinks. 

They don’t have the comms in her yet. 

“I, um,” she pulls away. “I did think of something you could do to help.”

David smiles. “Yeah?”

“You can help me pick out my scrubs.”


End file.
